Trust based secure routing mechanisms for wireless sensor networks: A survey

Wireless Sensor Network (WSN)is a predominant technology that is widely used in many applications such as industrial sectors, defense, environment, habitat monitoring, medical fields etc., These applications are habitually delegated for observing sensitive and confidential raw data such as adversary position, movement in the battle field, location of personnel in a building, changes in environmental condition, regular medical updates from patient side to doctors or hospital control rooms etc., Security becomes inevitable in WSN and providing security is being truly intricate because of in-built nature of WSN which is assailable to attacks easily. Node involved in WSN need to route the data to the neighboring nodes wherein any attack in the node could lead to fiasco. Of late trust mechanisms have been considered to be an ideal solution that can mitigate security problems in WSN. This paper aims to investigate various existing trust-based Secure Routing (SR) protocols and mechanisms available for the wireless sensing connection. The concept of the present trust mechanism is also analyzed with respect to methodology, trust metric, pros, cons, and complexity involved. Finally, the security resiliency of various trust models against the attacks is also analyzed.